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Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

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Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#261

Post by anticodon »

johndevor wrote: post #42
cryptoz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decades More than a century, in some cases. Capitalism needs additional constraints or it will end all civilization. Simply, the cost of creating greenhouse gasses has never been priced in to the market since Exxon and the likes have lobbied hard for decades to not let the truth gain any traction. They should all be in jail and there should be no profits in destroying ecosystems. Otherwise there seems no hope.

And yet capitalism gives us the greatest hope we have: companies like Tesla, and products like solar panels and wind turbines. None of that would exist without capitalism.

There're two statements without any proof: 1) that only capitalist system can create electrical cars and solar panels (obviosly false) 2) that electric vehicles and solar panels are good for the nature (there's not enough data, but to manufacture both you need a lot energy and materials, and not all electricity is created by clean sources)

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#262

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Apocryphon wrote: post #241
sooheon wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I just learned that I despise the prefix "ur-" far more than is reasonable. Seriously though, why not call it "tribalist"?

Not ultra- enough, in Lovecraft's case.

Lovecraft would've added at least three more adjectives.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#263

Post by Cthulhu_ »

SwellJoe wrote: post #222
_abattoir wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you, the guy who writes snarky tweets and codes web forms, have a lot more going for you in the annals of history than an internationally recognized titan of literature.

Lovecraft is sort of the B movies of literature: Fun as hell, inventive, wild, unexpected, crazy at times. But, not great literature.

Maybe not, but it was inspiring; people like Guillermo del Toro wouldn't have had their style or whatnot if it wasn't for Lovecraft. (speaking of, he still wants to do a Mountains of Madness movie)

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#264

Post by StormChaser_5 »

mlloyd wrote: post #107
leggomylibro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ! http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx Spoilers: "...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its…

God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.

If you would like a modern take on Lovecrafts ideas (with a whole bunch of IT geekery) try Charles Stross' Laundry Files

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#265

Post by scandox »

ekianjo wrote: post #211
scandox wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes extremely more. And I like his stories.

Someone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant…

I make my argument from his work, not from history. And I am responding specifically to the word Xenophobe. I think Houellebecq's analysis[1] is correct - the force of his work derives from the very extreme nature of his Xenophobia, which is personal and psychological in nature rather than ideological. Certainly he garlanded it with all the ideological backup he could find, but I don't think that's where it came from.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urban...

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#266

Post by simonh »

mlloyd wrote: post #107
leggomylibro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ! http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx Spoilers: "...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its…

God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.

I think people back then spent more time over their reading. Nowadays we expect easily digestible text we can speed through or skim. When reading something like that it pays to slam on the brakes and take some time over it.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#267

Post by ByThyGrace »

sulam wrote: post #138
dmix wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds very similar... Or at least variations of the same idea.

It's definitely not the same problem. Clathrates are methane, for one thing, and the permafrost issue will cause CO2 emissions. Clathrates are in the water, permafrost is soil. They are both associated with historically cold environments that are now warming up, but each has its own mechanism and likely impacts (clathrates may be worse, since methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but the permafrost melting…

What does "be with us" mean in the case of methane?

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#268

Post by GlennS »

sulam wrote: post #148
legohead wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get their test case. They took it to the lab, and thawed it up to room temperature ? That's not going to happen. It's going to get warmer, maybe just warm enough for the bacteria to thaw, and then immediately die. Did they do any realistic tests?

How warm do you really think things are going to get? There's no support for temperatures going up more than 20C. Bacteria will do just fine.

I think you've misunderstood the comment you were replying to.

I think they mean that the bacteria will not reach room temperature (20℃), but will get just warm enough to thaw out (1℃ or 2℃).

The reason they could die is probably not heat, but lack of anything to eat.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#269

Post by metafunctor »

mlloyd wrote: post #107
leggomylibro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ! http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx Spoilers: "...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its…

God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.

If you really truly got absolutely nothing from that, I suggest you perhaps read it again, more slowly, and try to evoke your mind's eye. Maybe try reading one of his books; it's difficult to get into the right mindset from just an excerpt like that.

I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft some 25 years ago, and I still have vivid imagined visual memories of the “unspeakable ancient horrors” described. Given this background, I find it strange that someone would get, or see, “absolutely nothing”.

I'd say H.P. Lovecraft is the literary equivalent of H.R. Giger. Different sub-genre of fiction, of course, but they've both contributed a similarly unique genre-defining take on things.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#270

Post by wiz21c »

sulam wrote: post #164
pdeuchler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people don't listen to the scientists, because absurd FUD like this gets spread and it discredits the entire movement. Even the most doomsday predictions are on the order of inches, maybe over a foot in the next 50 years. Such a rise would still be incredibly devastating, don't get me wrong, but it would take about a hundred years of a completely runaway warming cycle to raise the seas a single meter, muc…

I'm quite serious about the historical record. This is not FUD, this is data. The historical record shows that the last time atmospheric CO2 concentration was at the level we are at currently, several things were true. 1) temperatures were 4-5C higher. 2) there was no permanent surface ice anywhere on the planet as far as they can tell. 3) mean eustatic sea level was anywhere from 50 to 200m above current levels. htt…

When I read the paragraph 55 of the article, I think that it tells a different story. Basically, it's 20-30 meters higher seas; a good part of it coming from tectonic stuff. And they also say that sea level increase appeared before warming.
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